Speculation buys up, in a very practical way, the intelligence of those involved. - John Kenneth Galbraith

Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result.

There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.

There is nothing in economic life so willfully misunderstood as the great speculative episode. T